Thursday, December 15, 2011

Independent Bookstores as Amazon Showroom?

Amazon.com has been much in the news of late. They created quite a hullabaloo recently with their price comparison app. It would seem that Amazon is not content to be the largest retailer in the world, it wants to be the only retailer in the world. And given the way they treat their vendors, it would seem that they would not be kindly overlords if they were in fact to gain the world domination they seek.But then I came across this article in the NYTimes, and it got me thinking that they might be making a mistake. Here is the main point:

Bookstore owners everywhere have a lurking suspicion: that the customers who type into their smartphones while browsing in the store, and then leave, are planning to buy the books online later — probably at a steep discount from the bookstores’ archrival, Amazon.com. Now a survey has confirmed that the practice, known among booksellers as showrooming, is not a figment of their imaginations. According to the survey, conducted in October by the Codex Group, a book market research and consulting company, 24 percent of people who said they had bought books from an online retailer in the last month also said they had seen the book in a brick-and-mortar bookstore first. Thirty-nine percent of people who bought books from Amazon in the same period said they had looked at the book in a bookstore before buying it from Amazon, the survey said.

So dig that- If Amazon succeeded in shutting down all of their bookstore competition, their sales would go down! Maybe it's time for Amazon to start helping us out with the rent. It's in their own best interest.